Book Oven helps teams of people turn manuscripts into finished books, and then publish them. It is built for writers, editors, proofreaders, designers and small presses. See here for more details on how Book Oven works.

Book Oven was started by Montrealers Hugh McGuire and Stephanie Troeth, and has been built by a group of great people all over the world.

Background, Some History, the “Future,” Our Thinking and Rambling

The web has given us the ability to make and distribute art and writing to a global audience of billions, at almost no cost. It's given us the ability to connect and collaborate in new ways. It's created more writers, and more readers than the world has ever seen. We think this means that we are on the verge of a new kind of publishing landscape, one that harnesses the power of the web and embraces digital, where writers and readers will be connected in new ways. We expect millions of people will engage with books in ways they never did before. Book Oven is being built to help make this happen.

One of our myths is that writers work alone. But a finished book is the work of many dedicated people: the colleagues who give feedback on a text, the editors who help sculpt a writer's language and content, proofreaders who clean up copy, designers who make a book pretty.

Book Oven is a place where book lovers of all stripes -- readers, small publishers, writers, editors, designers -- can come together to help make (and buy! and read!) better books. How groups organize around creating books is up to them: individual writers can find strangers to work on their texts, small presses can use Book Oven as a workflow tool, collectives of experts can come together to create a book on their area of expertise. Many other models are possible. We'd like to see them all.

In the end, though, it's about building communities: the smaller communities that form around writers and their works, and a larger community of writers, readers, editors, proofreaders, designers, and book lovers of all kinds.

We'd like your help

In order to build Book Oven in the right way, we need the engagement of writers, editors, designers, readers, and book lovers. We've taken a few steps but there is much more we'd like to do. So we want to hear your thoughts, problems you've had – with Book Oven, or with writing or publishing in general, ideas you have about how Book Oven should evolve, about the kinds of tools that would solve some of the headaches you have.

Above all we hope that you will think of Book Oven as your space, a place where you can contribute to building a new community and platform where you will, we hope, make and help make many great books in the future.

The Book Oven Team

Hugh, co-founder of Book Oven, is a writer and web-developer. He’s the founder of LibriVox.org, an all-volunteer project to make free public domain audiobooks, once called “perhaps the most interesting collaborative cultural project this side of Wikipedia.” He likes podcasts, rugby, and cooking. Favourite authors include: Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago, Miriam Toews, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Steph, co-founder of Book Oven, has been working on the web for the last decade or so, wearing many different hats. She happens to be an expert on best web practices, actively involved in grassroots organizations advocating for an open and better WWW through community leadership, education and occasional public speaking. She also has a severe addiction to books that culminates chronic bookshelf shortage issues in her home. Steph has been writing online since 1999, with her latest and most sporadic project being a series of untitled writings.

Yanik is a sys admin, and senior developer, who has been programming since the early 90’s. He started his own web shop while in college, and sold his first web site around 1996. He obtained a diploma in computer science in 1996 and hopped from traditional desktop application development in C++ to tech support before ending back on the web in 2000. Since then, Yanik has built sites for some of the biggest companies in Canada (banks, telecom firms, media agencies) in ASP, Coldfusion, PHP and Python.

Andy MacDonald is a designer and integrator.

Janina Szkut is a developer.

Questions?

If you have questions, problems, confusions, suggestions, please do send us an email: contact@bookoven.com

Or ping us on twitter: @bookoven or identi.ca @bookoven.

And if you have some specific feedback about Book Oven, bugs or feature requests, you can tell us about it here: http://feedback.bookoven.com/.